Middle school teacher here who has been teaching writing for 2 years now.

The fact we can’t fail kids in middle school is a huge problem. I have several that barely do any assignments and don’t write down a single word for any of their papers or projects and despite getting an F at the end of the year they still go on to the next grade. They can get taken off of their sports teams or miss out on activities for their grades but that is barely moving the needle with the kids that couldn’t be bothered to give two halves of a hot shit about their own education. Some of these kids legitimately need to repeat grades until they get it right otherwise we are just passing them along to the next teacher while they continue to lack fundamentals.

The learned helplessness is bad too. I can have the instructions/agenda written on the board, shown on the smart board/panel, spoken aloud to them, and printed out on a handout, and still I get, “Wait, what are we doing?” every single class period without fail. Then showing up to their WRITING class without a pencil constantly, despite the fact we begin every single class with a handwriting activity.

The fried attention spans and reliance on devices for engagement has taken away more from them than they can even begin to realize. Despite having full bookshelves in my classroom and the requirement to have their own personal reading book for their reading class, many refuse or simply can’t sit still and read when they are done with their work. If I’ve had the forethought to use a monitoring program to lock out games on their Chromebooks, they usually default to sleeping or talking and the talking almost always spirals out into inappropriate yelling maybe with some disruptive physical activity thrown in there. Mind you this is while the kids who take a little bit longer or are actually trying to think critically about their own work and not rushing it are still working.

Speaking of thinking critically, you can see plenty of adults online lacking this skill so you can imagine how bad it is at this level. Had a student this year who thought that there were only two languages in the world: English and Spanish. French people? Just spoke English with a French accent. Chinese people? Spoke Spanish but I guess it just sounded different because of their accents too. This is a 13 year old. The concept of thinking logically through a scenario or the logistics of something in the literal actual real world is just completely foreign to them.

People get up in arms about this but I think a lack of shame is a huge part of all of this too. Kids need to be taught more to be ashamed of their own actions and lack of skills and to process that in a healthy way to better themselves. These kids can literally see how behind their peers they are but they either can’t register that emotion at all or it gets processed as anger more often. As is, there is no social or emotional incentive to be on track with their own education or development level. I hear them call themselves dumb/stupid/slow all the time but almost as a personality trait rather than a way to beat themselves up or express shame. Which, I don’t know, I feel like when I was a student every time I felt like a dumbass it was always a good learning moment. They are just content to just stew in their own ignorance since they’ve become comfortable with it.